Brent Michael Davids on Indigeneity and Freethought

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/02/19

*Further resources on the Indigenous Freethought series at the end of the article.*

Brent Michael Davids website biography states: “BRENT MICHAEL DAVIDS (Mohican/Munsee-Lenape) is a professional composer, and a music warrior for native equity and parity, especially in concert music where there is little indigenous influence. Davids places Native voices front and center. He originated and co-founded the award-winning Native American Composer Apprentice Project (NACAP), championing indigenous youth to compose their own written music. He uses indigenous instruments, including handmade quartz flutes, and pens performable notations that are themselves visual works of art. Davids is co-director of the Lenape Center in Manhattan, and is enrolled in the Stockbridge-Munsee Community. His composer career spans nearly five decades, with countless awards and commissions from America’s most celebrated organizations and ensembles.

International ensembles have premiered his works globally in Austria, Bermuda, Canada, England, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Portugal, Russia, Scotland, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, and throughout the United States, including Carnegie Hall, Disney Concert Hall, Tanglewood Music Center’s Koussevitzky Shed and Ozawa Hall, Rothko Chapel, The Joyce Theater, Lincoln Center, Lincoln Center Out-Of-Doors, and The Kennedy Center. Davids is in high demand as an Educator and Consultant for Films, Television, Schools, Festivals, Seminars and Workshops. In 2006, the National Endowment for the Arts named Davids among the nation’s most celebrated choral composers in its project “American Masterpieces: Three Centuries of Artistic Genius.” And In 2015, the prestigious Indian Summer Music Festival awarded Davids its “Lifetime Achievement Award.”

Davids’ most recent project is “Requiem for America: Singing for the Invisible People.” This major work tackles the genocidal founding of America, giving voice to America’s Indigenous People. “Requiem” exposes a specific genocide in each state, juxtaposing genocidal texts from America’s founding against historical letters from American Indians themselves. In addition to the Western singers and orchestra, each performance will feature Indigenous singers recruited from local tribal communities. Once completed, it is hoped that “Requiem” will tour every state in the country.

Here we talk about the Mohicans, Munsee-Lenape, America, and Indigenous freethought.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, today, we are here with Brent Michael Davids. He is an American Indian filmmaker and creative type. He is a recommendation from Dan Barker when I was interested in looking into the international Indigenous freethought community. Naturally, I like to start from a narrative perspective. I wanted to get some of the background. How did you get into filmmaking, into creative production?

Brent Michael Davids: First, let’s correct the record, I am not a filmmaker. I am a film score composer and write music. 

Jacobsen: I apologize.

Davids: I got into scoring films; I started in high school composing music. I took music. So, I will go back further. It is an American Indian thing.

Jacobsen: [Laughing]. 

Davids: I am from a reservation in Wisconsin. We were displaced from New York. Like Dan Barker, I’m originally from the territory of New York. So, I am a Mohican and Munsee-Lenape mix. We were displaced in a trail of tears situation to Wisconsin. That is a long story. But I am living here now. I was raised in the Chicago area because my dad who was born and raised here on the reservation wanted a better life for his kids. So, he moved us to Chicago. He and mom researched the best schools in the area. We discovered District 214 in Chicago. That is where we went and lived. I went to a high school. I got extra training. One of the trainings was music theory. I was playing in band. I took 2 years of music theory in high school. I was proficient in all music theory when I got to college. I was composing in high school.

When I got to college, I was continuing in my career and started scoring music for ballet and modern dance. I was scoring the movement. You must interpret, emotionally interpret, and physically interpret, and the textures, colors, and everything for dance. I moved from there to scoring little commercials and things for television, and then moved into film, independent films, and TV films – scoring. I am a concert composer. That is my training, so orchestras and stuff like that. I maintain status with the reservation. Even when I lived in Chicago land, we would always come back to the reservation because my dad still had a house here. We spent our summers here. We maintained the ties. Now, I am living here on the same property, same land assignment as we say, as my dad and my grandpa and his dad. So, it is still in the family line. That is the basics. And I am an atheist.

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Davids: [Laughing].

Jacobsen: Different people can mean different things in terms of the term: Atheist. It seems like an obvious thing in terms of someone self-identifying. A lot of Euro-Americans, my sense of when they say, “Atheist.” Typically, within an American context, they mean the God of the Bible, not a rejection of all gods necessarily. How are you characterizing this term for yourself?

Davids: Loosely, I suppose. If you want to be technical about it, I am, probably, a lot of things. Agnostic atheist, I don’t believe there is this nebulous “I am spiritual but not religious” Christianity. People say that too. I reject them all. I had an experience when I was a kid, where I had an imaginary friend when I was 4 years old. For some reason, I don’t know how. I figured it out. I had this friend who I could talk to. She was an imaginary friend. For some reason, I figured that that is impossible. That can’t really be what is happening. So, I got myself out of it. That has happened before in other situations. I was raised in a Christian tradition but grew up free in that as well. I was told, I was taught, that people had souls, but animals didn’t. I had a beloved dog, an old family dog. I couldn’t imagine how I could have a soul and go to heaven and not the dog. Because the dog was completely loving and a beautiful creature. That cannot be. There is an incongruence there. 

For me, it was a relief later to really think about it and discover that I didn’t have a soul either. Instead of trying this soulless on my dog, I came around the other way. People don’t have souls either. 

Jacobsen: [Laughing]. 

Davids: I could join the animals in revealing that none of us do. I have the same feeling. We don’t know for sure these theories people have about panpsychism or consciousness, and souls. My sense of it is that the best approach is globally outside of culture. If we think globally, like humanity across the planet, that we are all evolved, then everyculture on the planet has an old story. Greeks, Romans, American Indians, we all have these stories. Everyone looks at the stars. We have different ways of talking about different lives and cultures and the search for meaning. Who are we? What are we doing here? We came up with different solutions depending on where we lived. Everyone has them. Everyone is special and no one is special. Looking at the world now, globally, for me, the most exciting investigation into who we are and the meaning of what we are doing here doesn’t come from religion at all. It comes through scientific inquiry. It’s quantum physics. It is all the sciences. I find them super exciting. Exploring space, philosophy of the mind, any science that you can think of, scientific inquiry. I think that is our best bet for finding out who we are, what we are doing here, and what it all means, and the stories, the old stories, might have been the best science we could come up with at the older time. 

If you look at 2,000 years ago, I might have been in the same camp, believing the best available source of information. Maybe, there was a firmament above in the sky like in biblical times. Maybe, people believed in the sky world. We didn’t know what the points of light were. We couldn’t see all the planets then. Many of our greatest historic Native leaders only saw however many planets you can see with the naked eye, maybe 5. All the other planets, we learned through technology and instruments, and science. I have a hard time wrapping my mind around “spiritual.” To me, it is a gobbledy-gooky undefined term, I prefer not to use it. I know people prefer to use it. Native people use it. But I don’t. Then again, there are people who tried to change the meaning of it. “Sacredness.” There is the sacred mountain, sacred land, sacred river. But it had a different meaning in the West. It is better to not use it rather than put it in the law. People want to put “sacredness” into law and that this must be protected. But there is a dualism with sacredness. There is the sacred. But in the West, there is the profane in opposition to the sacred. If you are talking about sacred things, you are also talking about something profane. Where is that? If we talk about the sacred river, where is the profane river? Is this river not sacred too? There are all sorts of questions raised. Things that don’t really make sense. All the rivers are sacred or none of them are. It doesn’t matter what you say, if you treat the rivers with respect.

In Native cultures, there is this idea of “we’re all related.” That is an old direct way of feeling like you’re a relative with the whole Earth. The two-legged, the winged-ones, the fish, and everybody, are thought of as extended kinship, like people, like animal people. Wind people, tree people, traditionally, in Native cultures, we’re thinking of the world in that way. We are relatives. You don’t want to kill all your relatives, so you can build a house. So, you don’t chop down the entire forest. You wouldn’t do that. These ways people forage for food. They will skip the row and look for the second row, and skip that row too, and only harvest the third row because they need the other rows to survive for the future. There is a way of preserving life and not taking too much, not being greedy in other words, about it all. It comes down to preserving not just some exotic species of dolphin, because we’re all relatives. 

We know the fact of evolution. That we’re all thinking apes. We evolved from simpler forms to more complex forms increasing in thinking. It is all true. We are literally of the earth, like we are thinking apes. We don’t need a spiritual connection. There doesn’t need to be a spirit there. We literally are, like Carl Sagan says, “Star stuff.” Material in our teeth and bones was formed from the background radiation of the universe. We are the materials, the same materials from the universe. Again, me looking at my dog and realizing, he doesn’t have a soul either. We don’t need that spiritual connection with other people. We don’t need the “sacred” texts, which is a fancy way of limiting discussion. I took a degree in religious studies too, in addition to music, an anthropological approach. My old professor used to say, “Saying a lake is sacred is a block to further inquiry.” It is a sacred cow. You’re not supposed to talk about it, no matter what, you won’t talk about this subject. You can’t question things like religious beliefs because people consider them sacred. It means that inquiry or things that can be asked won’t be asked. “Everyone believes, so don’t buck the trend. I should not go against the commonly accepted wisdom of the masses.” You are pressured into believing things sometimes because everyone else does. Or you do it by authority. Your parents taught you this or your grand elders told you this story. Therefore, you can’t be disloyal to them by disbelieving what they say, so you go along with that too.

You are raised to believe in certain things, so “you should too!” I do not buy any of that, based on certain experiences or awakenings I’ve had, breaking out of bubbles in my thought. I think it is better to think things through yourself. Like Dan Barker says, “Try and go about the world and do the least amount of harm.” That is an ethical choice to make. You can really conduct your lives that way. I think that matches well what traditional Native American beliefs are, the different life ways that are there. It’s just that they’re cultural stories that people have told themselves, some of them have these wisdom traditions. People that really do help us. If you want to know what goodness is or evil is, you can listen to the stories. It gives you a hint of what our forebears thought was good and evil. Like, if you look at the Native stories, you can see right away evil doesn’t mean the same thing as in the West, in the Western perception. In the West, there is this fear of floating off somewhere, the Devil lives there. It is hell. It is where you go after you die. Or you can make yourself infamous with the devil sinking evil into your soul or whatever.

Native people have stories like that too. But when you look at it, what is going on in the ceremonies and traditions, evil’s more of a concept around health and wellness. If you are sick, the Natives talk about something being evil or the devil. It means you’re out of tune, you’re sick. You are not sane. You are not well. The ceremonies are designed to bring people into wellness. It is a different concept than pure goodness with God and the angels in heaven, evil influencing the world. This is more like health and wellness functioning in the culture. That is my take on it after looking at tons of stories. 

Jacobsen: There is a term in international rights discussions about “post-colonial” States: New Zealand, Australia, Canada, the United States, South Africa. So, there is a context of precontact and colonial contact cultural mixup. Of what we know, although, as Dan corrected me in his interview, there can be cultural erasure. What do we know about precontact Lenni Lenape cultural ideas about a creator and things that would be seen as religious practices and ideas, and when Christian European colonialism came through?

Davids: That’s messy. That was one of the things that I went to study a degree in religions for. I went in with the idea, somehow, we had traditional native lives, and when that was, but it was so tainted by Christianization. It might be near impossible to go figure out what it was. But then, my idea was: If you could reverse engineer the situation, maybe, we could have a look. So, I remember going through all my studies trying to figure out what were the differences between contemporary Indigenous life and what the explorers say now, and how Westerners, Western Christianity, viewed the same situation. The thought was if I could somehow sift through the obviously Western Christian ideas, then maybe, what was left over might be closer to what the traditional Indians believed a thousand years ago. But that is hard. I was never convinced it was very successful because you have so many stories that are mixed.

You have creator figures. For example, Sam Gill wrote a book called Mother Earth. In the book, he posits that mother earth is a new phenomenon. It is not an age-old phenomenon. Native people would bristle at that. They did when he did publish the book. He got a lot of blowback from that from Native people. “Of course, we have mother earth.” But Gill went looking through the evidence trying to find where you can find it. He made distinctions. So, he said, “Mother earth isn’t the same as the Gaia Principle. Mother earth is about the earth, the Earth Mother.” People use it as spiritual. They use it in a way that is not well-defined. Sometimes, it can be mother earth as literally the world, this Earth. Sometimes, it means the entire universe or the stars or the stories of Lakota and the Seven Sisters flying up and becoming the Pleiades. Did they really do that? Did they leave Earth’s atmosphere without protection, fly up and become hot balls of plasma in space? Or was it some spiritual connection with the stars? All these questions with the stories. They might make sense in listening to feelings and the movement of the stars; That we feel not alone in the universe because here is the world and something familiar or comfortable with it. But a lot of these stories have been told. They can’t be literal, like a woman falling through a hole in the sky and landing on the back of a turtle and the turtle becomes big and becomes the American continent.

We know that is not true, existentially true. But what does it mean, then? These stories, I forget the question. I am just riffing. 

Jacobsen: [Laughing, coughing] The general idea is [Laughing]… I think I forgot the question. So, pre-contact, contact culture. 

Davids: It is difficult. It would be nearly impossible. There are hints, though. There are authors who have written on it. I read a book on the Munsee Lenape. The author was honest. I think it was the first time I’d ever seen this, when they were talking about some old text that was written or stories written down, sketching stuff, not first-person accounts by Native people. They were written down by informants, anthropologists, or linguists, who were interviewing Native people and then writing these down. It wasn’t first-hand. It was second-hand. This one author wrote something about “Here’s the stories of the spirits and ghosts, and witches, and things like that in the old…”, which isn’t recorded. There isn’t a deciphering of what that meant. We don’t know. What did they mean? The author was going on this idea about continuity in history. If someone can’t be risen from the dead today, then there is a high probability that that cannot happen in yesteryear either. So, if we don’t know what we are talking about in the spiritual world today, like there are so many different definitions, then it becomes, at a certain point, useless as a term, often. The same applies in yesteryear. They also might not have had a clear grasp of what they were saying when they were talking about writing this stuff down, the informants, and talking about it. They might not have thought it through as well either. 

They might not have had the modern science that we have today. This was pre-Copernicus, pre-Galileo, pre-Maxwell, pre-Einstein, pre-Schrodinger. We know so much more about how the world works, materially. So, we don’t have to rely on Thor to do it, or Zeus or the Creator. We don’t actually need those stories anymore. So, that is the question for me. With Christianity, colonization, you get Christianity used as a weapon: the Doctrine of Discovery was a doctrine of domination. It was used as a weapon to spread across the Americas to subdue people. I remember Christopher Hitchens one time mentioning, in one of his speeches, you can almost look across the history of fascism. If you replace the word fascism, you can almost do it 100% replacing fascism with the Catholic Church. All of the factors would hold. So, there is this weaponized Christianity, which has been applied to colonialism. There might only be – I heard a Lakota person talking – 15% of the traditional culture left after colonization. So, what do you do with that? That is a big question. The same is true for Lenape people. The language is in danger. Mohican people too. I am part Mohican. The devastation was immense, the colonization and the Christianization of peoples. For a while, it was only certain tribes. For the Mohicans and Lenape people, we became Christians and lived in Christian towns, Christian Indians in Christian towns, because that was a way to survive. 

If we did not do that, we might have gone extinct sooner. It gave us a way to be involved and stay viable in a community that was vastly outnumbered. We were being outnumbered exponentially. In the period 20 years before the revolutionary war, like the 1740s, the Mohicans were living in a little place. All of the Mohicans, the only Mohicans left, were living in Western Massachusetts in a place now called Stockbridge, Massachusetts. They Christianized us. We agreed to be Christian. They ministered in the community. It allowed us to survive. We were limited to camps in what is now a golf course in the lower part of the valley. Then they incorporated us. They wanted us to be Christian. We formed this Christian township. Then they said to be proper Christians and civilized, “We want you to live along main street.” So, we started to do that, to move up along the main street and live in houses. Then we became in debt. They introduced debt. We overextended ourselves. We couldn’t pay the debt. We got thrown in prisons. There was this debtor’s scheme of putting people in jail to pay off their debts. Of course, we had no money. Because we had no money and had been incorporated into this Christian township. There were rules in place. Where, if you were considered a landowner, then there were different rules in prison for you in prison or jail. If you were a vagrant with no land holdings, you would have been let out of jail because you wouldn’t have had any ability to pay anyway. They would just let you out. If you were a landowner, it was more severe. They wouldn’t let you out of jail. 

Mohicans were put in jail until they died, some of them. Then they passed laws so that the relatives of this jailed dead person can assume the property and finances of the dead person. Once they had died, the wife, for instance, in one case, had to pay off her husband’s debt using land and money. They used the land schemes to pay off people’s debt. It is a debtors’ scheme to get people to pay off with land. So, when you use the land debtors’ scheme to make them pay more land than they had, it is a debtors’ scheme to take land. That started 20 years before the Revolutionary War. We fought in the Revolutionary War with George Washington; We had a full Mohican Brigade that fought in Brooklyn for him. We came back. The rest of our land had been taken away. So, by 1788, 20 years or so after the revolution, we were completely removed from that Western Massachusetts area, taken off. 

Jacobsen: As that historical record has proceeded forward more into the present with near decimation of the population, how is the culture now? Following from that, not answered at the same time but following from that, how is being an atheist within a community that may hold steadfast to traditional ideas or mixed ideas with Christianity of some kind of deity?

Davids: It is true. I would think most of the people here, like on the reservation, probably, believe something. There are Christians here who go to church. I was talking to a second cousin of mine. He believes in Adam and Eve. He doesn’t believe in evolution. He doesn’t believe that we evolved from apes. So I disagreed, “You probably don’t want to say that too loudly in public because you will get laughed at because evolution is a fact these days, not theory. We evolved from a common ancestor with apes. The earth is older than 6,000 years.” Here is an instance of someone and others in the community who believe the Christian indoctrination, which was originally used as a weapon against us, with their minds and everything. I’d say, “Mind and souls,” but I don’t believe in souls [Laughing].

Jacobsen: [Laughing]. 

Davids: They see the history of Christian domination and Christian weaponization against the community. They reject that. But they might participate with the Lutherans. There was Lutheranization. There is a Lutheran church down the road. My grandfather helped build that. They joined in the community church activities. But they, themselves, may not be super believers. They might believe in a deity. There is some spiritual aspect to the world. They want to be connected to it. There are others like me who are atheist. I had an uncle who was atheist. Another prominent woman in the community was an atheist. In her funeral, she had John Lennon’s “Imagine” sung at the funeral because of that atheist camp. There are others in the country too. Looking in the country, there are a lot of Native atheists. I used to wonder about this question. How many atheists are there in the Native community? I didn’t know the answer to that. You can’t find a Gallup poll, polling on reservations to find out the statistics. But I think it depends on the Christianization question: The sloppiness of defining what is and is not a Christian belief. Native beliefs have been changing. It is an oral tradition. It is not written down. We don’t know, sometimes, if some Native person might be claiming that this is a traditional Native story, origin story or whatever, that trickled down the ages from ancestors. It can see that it is an early thing with some Christian story. 

You have to ask the question: Is it influenced by the onset of Christianity? It could be like the 1500s, people visiting from other countries. I remember a story about a monk who sailed from Ireland to Nova Scotia down the east side of the United States way before Leif Erikson or Christopher Columbus in 750 AD. So, there was contact really early. You can’t say it changed at one point all at once. It is really messy. It is interesting to see. If I see a story that really propagates Christian beliefs, and I see it in a “traditional native story,” then people are using that as reasoning to say, “See, Native traditional stories are the same as Christianity.” I say, “Well, there may be a more direct translation of that.” It could be colonization that did that, and we just forgot. I think that’s how these modern stories appeared like Sky Woman, Buffalo Woman, and Spider Woman that you hear all over the country. People were molded from clay. We are living on the back of a giant turtle. These stories were not necessarily true. But some people might actually believe them. Some don’t. So, about the atheist question, back to your point; We are similar. We are so indoctrinated and so mixed with Western cultures now. That it is really hard to decipher. You can turn it the other way around too. If a quarter of the population is atheistic or nonbelieving, it is probably similar inside Indian communities as well. 

Since a couple years ago, I didn’t know the answer to that. I would guess right now that we are about the same as the general population. If I was in a room with 16, 4 of them on average are going to be nonbelievers. For the under 25, it could be up to 40%. In a room of people 88 or 89 years old, then it might drop down to 10 or 11% of nonbelievers. I think that’s true on reservations as well. I have met enough atheists now, we all confide with each other, very prominent atheists, some just everyday people like me in the community who don’t believe: It is a big mess. I don’t really have an answer for that. Whether Lenni Lenape beliefs, Mohican beliefs, or colonization, I don’t know if we can really know that. I read this one author who said that in an article on the Munsee, there is no way to really tell. We hear the stories. It is like today, there is no way to truly tell what they were talking about in the past either. They could have been talking about what we would interpret as spiritual now. I would contend. We don’t even know what that means. He was honest in saying, “We cannot say we were religious back in the day, in this form, as anthropologists wrote this down. We cannot accept this as truth now.” The same question applies today as it did in yesteryear. We still have to ask the same question. ‘What is it I actually mean with spiritual?’ When we talk about spirit or spiritual, are we talking about alcohol? Are we talking about someone who can run really fast with spirit, like spit and vinegar in them? Are we talking about ghosts, apparitions? Are we talking about some otherworldly thing? What are we talking about?

Most people don’t think about it that closely. They use these terminologies like “spirit” and “Creator” and assume everyone is talking about the same thing. You talk about it. They talk about it. Therefore, we must be talking about the same thing. They don’t think that much farther than that. Then we run around with mistranslations, misunderstandings. Everyone is assuming everyone else is talking about the same thing when we aren’t. So, that’s hard. It is hard. For me, I want to pick them apart and think about it. You get labeled as an agitator. “You are not really one of us. Why are you making things so complicated?” That sort of thing. I don’t know. I am contrarian that way. Sometimes, it feeds me. It almost drives me. “I am going to really figure this out now.” I might find out more because of that. Living in the community, it is difficult. There are all sorts of people from believers to nonbelievers of all stripes. There are some people who are more scientific too. I did a movie score once for a video that was about “Dancing with Photons.” It was about the life and times of Dr. Fred Begay who was a nuclear scientist working at Los Alamos. He was working with lasers to superheat plasma. I think it was looking for some form of clean energy source in the process. He was Navajo. 

He was telling about how the traditional stories of Navajo life inspired him to work with lasers. He is not around anymore. I didn’t get to interview him. I would have asked him, ‘How did your use of Navajo stories of life translate into lasers? What inspired you to know what those stories actually were?’ He referenced them. He didn’t say what they actually were. The Lakota Seven Sisters flying off to become the Pleiades, that would be a far stretch. How would that really relate to lasers. In some other cultures, like Montana, there is the same story. But it’s a girl and her seven brothers fly off to become the Pleiades. People are inspired by this, and some modern writers are too: poetry, poets especially. They very quickly take a spiritual tack. It is great poetry in their writing. Sometimes, it is not existentially true. It glosses over things. It contravenes how things really are, how they really work. It can be magical and fun at the same time. They use Native tribes. Sometimes, they don’t. My job is finding out which is which. I am not a scientist. I cannot go to the blackboard with Schrodinger’s equations and Hilbert Space or anything like that. I have to trust what I read, published opinions, and watch scientists, and read articles, and so on. I am interested in that too, figuring things out. 

What makes things the way they are? I am really inspired by that as a Native person. Then there are other people who are scientific people. So, it is tricky. It is like we are walking with one foot where there are magical creatures who change into humans and change into snakes and change into coyotes and change back into people again, skinwalkers and shapeshifters, and the rivers and the hawks. Then there is the world that we share with other human beings on the planet, of science and modern cosmology. Native people have been so abused. We’ve lost so much to Christianization and also to conquering colonization. We lost so much. If we have 10% or 15% of our culture left, we hang onto it with dear life. So, part of it is just defensiveness. 

Native people want to hang on to Native stories. We are not just hanging on to curiosities of our past culture but hanging on to our past life,  “I am not going to not believe this story because the modern world wants to move on without me. That makes me x, y, or z. I am a Native person. I am Indigenous because I believe these stories. I believe in Mother earth. I believe in the spiritualness of the world and the Creator.”

Part of me, sometimes, thinks they are saying this because it is a belief they actually have, which they might. But they are saying it out loud to help reinforce that they have this belief. They are saying it to solidify the conviction and hang on to the culture. They want to hold on to it, which makes it even more messy. You see what I am saying? It is so mixed up and jumbled and confused. 

It is hard to decipher what Christianity did to us, and what it was like before Christianity because it is all mixed up now. That is not even taking into account that Christianity itself has messed up. I think there is nothing such as spirits, souls, God, or the Devil. I don’t think those things exist. I don’t think there is a deity or a spiritual essence moving the stars to be a certain way forming goldilocks planets. I don’t think that is the way the universe functions. It doesn’t really have a purpose. It just is. The happenstance of that, being a part of that creative process in evolution, we definitely can destroy. We do have an influence on the creation too because we are part of it. I think that is true. 

If we can put so much CO2 gas in the atmosphere, we are changing the environment. We can destroy ourselves. Scientists are calling it the Anthropocene, human caused mass extinction. If we have the ability to do it, then, maybe, we have the ability conversely to nurture the environment as well. Again, corn, corn was some grass nurtured and nurtured and nurtured through care, loving care, until it became bred and bread. Dogs are bred, and other species, evolution is nature doing it. We understand that. There are some people that don’t. They don’t understand the concept of nature doing the breeding. There has to be “some purpose” behind the universe. There must be some “universal consciousness” running the show. I think there are people who believe it and people who don’t. 

With the term atheist, I am being loose with it. I don’t want to be apologetic or split hairs about it. I am really not a believer. Unless there is some really strong evidence to believe, I am not going to believe. I would believe if there were some ways to be convinced. I am not certain what that way might be. If I have some epiphany, I don’t even know. If there was some evidence that could convince me that there was some deity or something out there, I could change my mind. I used to be a believer. I remember what that felt like. But I do not have that anymore. Again, I forget what we were talking about.

Jacobsen: [Laughing] That is a good premise for the next question or is. Individuals who are atheists or agnostics, secular humanist, freethinkers; somewhere along that category constellation who still are living either on reservation or on the periphery off reservation and still consider themselves culturally part of community who enjoy ceremonies, rituals, taking part in some of these aspects of cultural life while not believing in any of the supernaturalism associated with them. How does that balance get struck when it is culturally accepted? Not something to judge, it is something taken part in because it is like going to a concert or an atheist who goes to mass with a parent or a loved one because they enjoy that company and little bit of music and ceremony, but it is not something that they substantively believe as factually true in terms of the claims behind them.

Davids: That’s true. There is that here. I am that way too. I have preferences I enjoy and certain things I don’t. I enjoy certain kinds of music. Other kinds of music, I don’t enjoy. I have my own preferences. The same is true with Native ceremonies. Just because it is a Native ceremony, it doesn’t mean I like them all. There are ones I like and ones I don’t. I do that. I join in, in the community because I like being part of the community. But I am not a believer. For me, personally, I try not to be a jerk about it. I don’t go around proselytizing atheism or anything to the community. If someone is suffering and it is a funeral, and everyone is giving condolences, I don’t go around correcting them, “I don’t believe in a creator. Your loved one went nowhere.” I wouldn’t do that. But I do believe that. People do go poof, out of here, because it seems to be scientifically the best explanation of what is going on. Our souls—if there is such a thing—would be outside our cranium, our brain. When the brain stops working, everything ends. There is nothing to continue. I heard Dan Barker describe this as a function of your stomach. Hunger is a function of your stomach. If you walk across the room, then you take your hunger with you. It is not like you can leave your hunger at the other side of the room, growling and scaring people.

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Davids: Like an apparition floating over there, it is ridiculous to think about it that way. I think souls are the function of brains. That’s what brains do. We tend to reify consciousness as a soul. People are seeing outward right between our eyes. There is something back there, like a soul gland or something in our head that’s where everything is, when we talk to ourselves and whatnot. I just don’t think it works like that. So, I think it was David Chalmers who was debating people on panpsychism, on the “hard problem” of consciousness. I agree with Sean Carroll. The problem of our consciousness, the more we understand about brains and how brains work, and the underlying physics, the hard problem will be a question nobody asks anymore. It will fade away because it is not that important anymore. 

If we are looking at the sky in ages past, and if there is a firmament out there, we know the twinkling is the atmosphere. It is not that the stars twinkle. It is because we are looking through Earth’s atmosphere. If you are outside the atmosphere, and if they don’t twinkle, that is why we build space telescopes. It is a twinkling effect. Now, we are dealing with other effects like gravitational halo effects. There is always something. In the old days, I could imagine somebody looking up there and thinking it is pinholes and a dark fabric and there is life up there. There is a whole other civilization above us. There are little leaks, little pinhole leaks in the sky. We can see movements of something up there. You can imagine that scenario. It is biblical. There was a firmament in biblical times. There is also Native life, the lands above us. That sort of thing. 

So, one of the differences is the question: I don’t know if that is something that is an old story that came from just people around the globe who are thinking about the sky in old days as something all cultures have done—or if it is something indoctrinated from Christianity. There is a tale about the sky story, about Native people, and it is all water. They’re speaking about floods and stuff. They shared commonalities. It is common because we are all human beings, homo sapiens, and produce the same sort of stories. Or is it one culture influencing another? It is a hard question to answer. 

For instance, the story of the bear. In North America native stories, there is a constellation about Ursa Major and Ursa Minor. For many Natives in the Northeast woodlands, it is a bear. It is a celestial or sky bear constellation. There are all different stories and things that go along with it. People playing a game of lacrosse in the sky. That’s when we hear the thunder. There is hunting. There is a celestial bear. There is drumming and music. Little brothers are bored. It connects us to drums, lacrosse, and the stars, and the bear. Here on Earth, we would hunt the bear and give it a bear ceremony. A bear would ritually be killed and also consumed in a big ritual or big house ceremony. You would eat an entire bear. The bear’s head would be staked or put on a tree and decorated. Then you are doing that to try bringing life back to the bear. For you, life is a cycle. You are taking part in the cycle, nurturing it along. 

But this story also appears in China. So, they have a celestial bear in Ursa Major and Ursa Minor. How did that happen? How did that get there? There was a big break. If you look at the evolution of our DNA, we share DNA with the Siberians. So, how do these stories progress? There is Russia and China right next door to each other. There is migration there too. It is conceivable that some story like this could be far older than 10,000 years in the past. Because before that, it was the Ice Age. There were no Northeastern woodlands. We know that DNA tests show that we, maybe, had a common ancestor with the Siberians 30,000 or 60,000 years ago. I think Francis Collins, the Genome Project guy, said that modern humans were around for 100,000 years and Dawkins thinks a couple 100,000. Thinking in terms of evolution, and following these stories around, it is conceivable that this story could have been invented and held onto for a really long time. I once had a conversation with this composer. His name is Jose Maceda. He was one of the biggest Filipino composers. We were at this conference in Japan. It was supposed to be in China, but then Tianamen Square happened with the killing of the students. It was the International Music Festival. Jose was telling me. We were sitting and talking about creation stories and Indigenous stuff. I told him about the turtle island story. He said they have the same story. Again, it is another story.

How old is that story? Where did that come from? He was claiming it was an old Philippine story. I know it as a Native American story. The mixing of cultures and populations traveling around and the evolution of these stories and life, it gets really hard to make hardcore conclusions. I try to keep an open mind about it, in my community. I let people believe what they want to believe. This friend who believes in Adam and Eve and not evolution, I didn’t try to correct him. I’d say, “Just don’t shout that too loud. You might look a little foolish.” [Laughing]

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Davids: I didn’t try and say don’t believe it, believe what you want to believe. This is slowly changing the community that way. There was an aunt who was popular here. She was highly educated, an activist. She used to jump in a van with a bunch of people and protest at the drop of a hat about important things. She did reel-to-reel recordings, recorded birds, recorded old elders, and had cassette tapes. I know this because, after she passed, I was hired to digitize her entire collection of recordings. I heard everything. I had to do it in real-time. I had to listen to everything. She was also an educator. She started up this tribal publishing company. She was teaching poetry. She built a retreat in her house. She had her big, huge house in the basement. It was nothing but apartments. The place was the same. She would invite people to come and have entire conferences in the tribal estate for poetry, writing, and literature. When at her house, she had little post-it notes about everything, little verses and phrases, and references. Everywhere you go down the hallways, bathrooms, rooms, notes everywhere. Because she was promoting literacy and poetry and thinking. She was an atheist. I talked to her about it. I said, “Why do you go to church?” She said she goes to hang out with the other ladies.

Jacobsen: [Laughing]. 

Davids: She likes to hang out with other women and likes the company. She doesn’t agree with this stuff but goes anyway. She was really a beloved member of this community. There are people here who do not believe she was a nonbeliever. They think she was a believer, as I have had discussions with them too. “You realize she was an atheist.” They say, “No, no, she wasn’t!”

Jacobsen: So, Requiem for America, what was the inspiration for it? How did it get developed?

Davids: That started with the “Purchase of Manhattan.” We went to this meeting in New York City. It was a group of people who started Lenape Center. Now, I have been invited in as a co-director of the Lenape Center. At the time, I went to this first meeting. We were a few people walking around New York City, “You know, we are being erased. We are being effectively erased from all life in this part of the country that used to be ours. If we are not going to bring it back, who else will?” They decided that they are going to begin building the Lenape Center or a program, something, to get something going. I was there at the beginning. They were looking for something to do; some splash, some way to get noticed in the media. Some projects to kick things off in the first year of existence. 

I was wandering around the park in Lower Manhattan. I saw art where a Lenape person is shaking hands with a Dutch person. They are shaking hands in this supposed friendship. There is a string of wampum across their hands. Underneath, it says, “Purchase of Manhattan” in gold lettering. I jumped at this meeting. I said, “Why don’t we do the Purchase of Manhattan?” [Laughing] A play or musical or something. The idea stuck. They liked it. So, the way I did it was a concert opera on the Purchase of Manhattan. We did it with the idea that we would entice people to come and see the show with the idea of the myth of the “Purchase of Manhattan,” with the idea of the land sold, property, deeds, and everything was sold for a good deal, like $24 is the myth. We charged that. I wrote music that I thought would be attractive. The idea would let people in. When they see the show, “Oh no, it wasn’t sold at all. It was stolen.” There was war. There was death. There was murder. There was a driving away of these people. They would learn the truth. 

It would be sucking them in for something and the music would be attractive. They would be forced to hear the truth, but in a way that they cannot turn away from it because they want to hear the music, want to see. The curiosity would get the better of them. They would get a dose of the truth of the mythology of the founding. So, that led to the idea. 

If that can happen in New York, then every state in the country has the same story. Land was stolen across the United States. Why not a “Requiem for America” – turn the requiem on its head, make an anti-requiem? Pick one genocidal episode for every state in the country, then use that as a foil to get people interested. They will learn a little about Native history. We can combat the erasure that way and require at the same time that Native people have to be included in each production. If a Requiem is produced, it needs to be a real time requiem. Native singers must be invited into the production to sing with the traditional Western chorus as well. I am writing that into the project as I am going along. That requires more singers and choruses, and Western choruses, and they have to reach out to the local Native population in those States across the barriers and become friends and have to understand the questions that we are all asking right now. We don’t, maybe, know the answers, but the first step is becoming friends. It is hard to hate someone if you are their friend. The first step is to break down that wall. It is built into the project; you have to break down walls and reach out to local Native populations when you are producing this requiem in whichever state that you reside. They’re also learning about the history of colonization at the same time. That is the idea the project developed from. 

Jacobsen: Brent, thank you very for your insight and your time, today.

Davids: Oh! You’re welcome.

Further Internal Resources (Chronological, yyyy/mm/dd):

Saami

Lina Tebbla on the Sami and Being an Atheist (2023/11/18)

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